An FMRI Study Investigating Brain Mechanism Associated With Cognitive Reappraisal Regulation Of Fear In Adolescents

Emotion regulation is the hotspot and advancing topic in the multidisciplinary study such as current emotional field, developmental psychology and health psychology. Compared with other basic emotion, fear is one of the most widely-studied emotion due to its evolutionary and adaptabable function.However, there were not much study about the brain mechanism associated with emtional regulation of fear before, still less the study in which select adolescents as participants. Moreover, there are some pressing questions to be discussed in the previous study about brain mechanism associated with emotion regulation, such as train of thought ,research method and so on . Be aimed at the questions in the previous study, in this study, on the basis of Dynamic Synergetic Processing Model of Fear's Development and Regulation ,first, have a standardized revision to IAPS and select fear pictures inducing effectively fear by the experts' assess, then, have an fMRI study investigating brain mechanism associated with emotional regulation strategy of neglecting fear pictures' reappraisal and reinforcing fear or angry face's reappraisal.In this fMRI study ,select 31 right-handed participants( 15 middlers:7 male,8 female; 16 undergraduates:8 male,8 female) ,who belong to middle personality types in the EPQ, from the middle school(aged 12-15 years) and the university(aged 17-20 years), adopt standardized fear pictures(IAPS) and Chinese fear or anger faces as stimuli materials ,and choose dynamic processing in emotional inducement (match the fear stimuli)and emotional regulation(modulating the response to fear stimuli according to words cues) as experimental paradigm. By arranging for stimuli presentation sequence and changing different cognitive task demand (instructions),set up the situations of neglecting the fear's reappraisal and reinforcing emotional regulation ,and require the participants to perform neglecting and reinforcing fear stimuli's reappraisal emotional regulation according to emotional and non-emotional words cues. This study is designed to examine the brain activation's features associated with emotional regulation strategy of neglecting reappraisal and reinforcing reappraisal ,which Chinese adolescents apply in response to fear pictures and fear or angry faces, and to reveal age and gender features of the brain processing mechanism associated with emotional regulation strategy of fear stimuli's reappraisal.The results show that: (1) Fear's development and regulation is a nonlinear dynamic synergetic process. (2) In the Chinese adolescents, the brain areas involved in the reappraisal regulation processing of emotion are ventral frontal cortex, dorsal frontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex (cingulate cortex), temporal lobe, parietal lobe, insula lobe and left thalamus; Thebrain areas involved in emotional regulation strategy processing of neglecting fear pictures' reappraisal are right ventral frontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex, right temporal lobe and left and right parietal lobe, moreover, frontal cortex can inhibit the response of Limbic system, that is ,the processing of neglecting reappraisal increases the activation in frontal cortex, but decreases the activation in limbic system; The brain areas involved in emotional regulation strategy processing of reinforcing fear or angry faces' reappraisal are left ventral frontal cortex, left and right dorsal frontal cortex, left cingulate cortex or anterior cingulate cortex, left insula lobe and left thalamus, moreover, there is a stimulative relation between frontal cortex and limbic system, that is ,the processing of reinforcing reappraisal increases the activation in both frontal cortex and limbic system. (3) The age feature of the brain processing associated with reappraisal regulation strategy of emotion is more prominent. The middlers can modulate the emotional response of fear by applying the strategy of reinforcing reappraisal, but cannot inhibit the emotional response of fear by applying the strategy of neglecting reappraisal. The functional mature...